Election 2010: How the late absentees are breaking

By tim

Created 11/04/2010 - 3:52pm

Lots of votes still to count in San Francisco -- as of this morning, the Department of Elections said there were about 80,000 absentee and provisional ballots in the hopper. But some have been counted yesterday and today, and we can draw some conclusions.

Typically election-day absentees break fairly close to the way election-day votes break, and Kamala Harris is citing that -- and her campaign's own analysis -- to claim victory;[1]

"Uncounted ballots will only bolster Kamala Harris's lead, as they will reflect Harris's strong Election Day advantage."

In San Francisco, though, I've seen progressive measures that won on election day go down to defeat when the late votes, which were not as conservative as the early absentees but more conservative than election-day votes -- were counted.

We now have the newest results from the DOE[2], and a little quick math gives us some interesting trends. In D2, Janet Reilly has (marginally) increased her lead over Mark Farrell. She's gone from 6253 yesterday to 6512 today, a pickup of 259 votes. Farrell picked up only 223. So Reilly will probably still lead this race when all the votes are counted, but the RCV calculation will depend entirely on whether supporters of the third and fourth candidates, Abraham Simmons and Kat Anderson, were voting for Anyone But Reilly or were willing to put Reilly as a second choice.

In D6, Jane Kim picked up about 100 votes over Debra Walker, enough to make her the clear front-runner. Again, though: Do the more conservative Theresa Sparks votes go to Kim, whose supporters tried to portray Walker as part of a liberal machine and who touted her support for Prop. G, or do a sizable number go to Walker, another LGBT candidate?

D10? Not much has changed. Tony Kelly picked up 65 votes. Lynette Sweet picked up 80. Malia Cohen picked up 72. Steve Moss picked up 64. The rankings aren't going to change much. But this will be the mother of all RCV elections -- and we'll know more tomorrow, when DOE does its first RCV pass.